Mind & Body Research

We have a wealth of expertise across our partnership with considerable opportunities for bringing together different parts to improve mind and body related research.

Our research brings together different parts of our partnership, through the Maudsley and Guy’s and St Thomas’ Biomedical Research Centres, the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience at King’s College London, the Collaboration for Leadership in Applied Health Research and Care (CLAHRC) in South London, as well as a range of other health-related departments at King’s College London.

£50m has been committed to mind and body research since 2011, with over £17m since 2017.

Examples of current projects include: 

• Major informatics projects such as the Innovative Medicines Initiative’s (IMI) Remote Assessment of Disease and Relapse – Central Nervous System (RADAR-CNS) programme which explores the use of mobile technology in depression, Multiple Sclerosis and epilepsy.
• Discoveries at the frontier of psychiatry and immunology research. Building on previous work by Professor Carmine Pariante, Professor of Biological Psychiatry at King's College London, and Professor Matthew Hotopf, Academic Director of the Mind & Body Programme, a recent King’s Together Grant led by Professor Leonie Taams, Professor Pariante and Dr Franziska Denk from King's College London will create a network focused on inflammation biology, neuroscience and mental health to accelerate research and enable innovative approaches into improving care for both the mind and body in cases of chronic inflammation. Currently the grant is supporting three pilot projects: Pain Research in Inflammatory Disease (PRIDE), Early Adversity, and Inflammation and Depression.
• The CLAHRC South London’s psychosis theme is leading work to improve the physical health of those with severe mental illness including projects such as Walk this Way and Physical Health Plans.
• The Integrating Mental & Physical healthcare: Research, Training & Services (IMPARTS) project database facilitates research through routine collection of patient reported outcomes in medical settings. Recent publications have covered topics including: depression and anxiety in people with psoriasis; improving distress in diabetes; the use of mental health screening for patients with temporomandibular disorders; and, smoking and common mental disorders in patients with chronic conditions.

Potential Future Projects

• We are looking to support additional use of CogStack across King's Health Partners' partner Trusts. CogStack is an information retrieval and extraction platform with the ability to search any clinical data source. This will support clinical trial recruitment, service improvement and the delivery of personalised patient care.
• By continuing our approach on the use of improvement and implementation science for clinically-facing research projects, we will support the development of patient clinical pathways and open up new areas of mind and body research.